Tuesday, August 9, 2011

August Guest – Peter Richardson!

1) What was your first published work?
The cover to a book titled Lyrico (of all things), written by Elizabeth Farmer about a girl with a flying horse. Published by Piccolo books, which was the children's imprint of Pan books.

2) Who or what inspires you?
The world about me, there's always a lot to get excited about and of course other illustrators, film makers, artists and musicians.

3) What would be your dream job to illustrate?
I'd LOVE to get back to drawing comics, as in real comics/ graphic novels where you collaborate with a story teller and just concentrate on delivering the best artwork imaginable without having a committee on your case asking you to dot every i and cross every t. This happens a lot with educational publishing which is where a lot of the work for jobbing illustrators resides these days.

4) Tell us a bit about the illustration you've sent?
Well it's an artwork from just such a project but at least I was allowed to design the look and feel of the stories and the characters they were centred around.

5) What can we expect to see from you next (what are you working on)?
I've just finished a gi-normous project that has kept me tied up for the last six months and I am actually looking forward to doing a few works of my own before I start to succumb to the never ending anxiety of the self employed, scurrying around like that little rodent that appears at the start of Ice Age, eyes bugging out, teeth chattering etc, etc at which point I start stressing that the phone hasn't rung and no one is commissioning anymore.

6) If you hadn't become an artist what do you think you'd have ended up doing?
God only knows - I am otherwise unemployable. Might have pursed a career in journalism I suppose.